There are questions about the medical treatment he received.
About four hours after Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was admitted to an Austin hospital with a gunshot wound, the Venezuelan man was discharged Sunday and taken 135 miles south to an immigration detention center where some detainees have complained about inadequate medical care.
The bullet fired by a federal immigration officer is still lodged to his back, according to Garces Perez and his immigration lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch. After he began “experiencing an inability to move his arm,” Garces Perez was taken to another hospital for treatment, the lawyer said.
His lawyers, Democratic leaders and immigrant advocates have questioned whether Garces Perez received proper medical treatment and whether he was taken into custody before he could fully heal.
Garces Perez was working as a DoorDash delivery driver when he was shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer during a traffic stop in North Austin. His lawyer said that Garces Perez did have a work permit and a driver’s license but expired in December. After he was taken to the hospital, Lincoln-Goldfinch said she and Garces Perez’s wife were not allowed to visit him.
On Monday evening, after he called into a news conference to say that he has not received any medication, he was transported to a second hospital after he complained of losing feeling on the left side of his body, his lawyer said.
“Wilber tells me that after he spoke publicly, guards at the Pearsall detention center forcibly took the tablet from his hands, revoked his communication privileges, and moved him out of the infirmary into an isolated room with a flat bed that cannot be adjusted like a medical bed,” Lincoln-Goldfinch said.
By Tuesday afternoon, Garces Perez, 28, of Venezuela was back at the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall.
Doctors who have treated immigrants injured by ICE say that while Garces Perez’s treatment may seem harsh, it appears that medical staff and ICE officers treated him like any other person in this situation.
DHS released a statement Tuesday saying Garces Perez is receiving “medical care around the clock, including pain medication.” The statement also said ICE officers do not control the medical treatment for the bullet lodged in his back.
“ICE does not and would not advise, nor be the authority on, a medical procedure for an illegal alien at a hospital,” the statement said.
Marc F. Stern, a doctor and an assistant professor at the University of Washington, said he doesn’t like to see any patient recovering in a detention center, but unless ICE forced the medical staff to release Garces Perez prematurely it is common for patients with a lodged bullet to be discharged. He added that in many cases attempting to remove a bullet does more harm than good.
“We’d all like to believe the system works but under the current administration the rule of law has suffered a lot,” Stern said. “So do we have the confidence that all of this is happening correctly? I would hope so.”
Brian Elmore, a doctor who has treated injured immigrants in Mexico and is a current Global Emergency Medical fellow at the University of Virginia, said he recently discharged a Maryland man who also had a bullet lodged in his back. He said it is important to have a post-discharge treatment plan.
“In somebody that isn’t detained, these patients would have close follow-up with their trauma surgery team and be discharged with pain medication,” he said. “The problem with these patients is that they are often discharged in conditions where they receive inappropriate or absent medical care.”
See here and here for some background, and this KUT story for more on the same topic. The basic consensus seems to be that leaving the bullet in place often makes medical sense, which I can understand. The real concern is the followup care he is getting, and there are a vast array of reasons to doubt that ICE gives a damn. Keep that pressure up, this cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.
Two old white Democratic former Senators who are now the Mayors of big cities face a similar situation, and take different paths.
Hours after a federal officer shot a Venezuelan man during a chaotic traffic stop Sunday in Austin, the city’s mayor was clear that he wanted the police department to investigate the shooting.
Mayor Kirk Watson said he didn’t trust federal investigators to conduct a thorough probe of the federal officer’s actions that left Wilber Rafael Garces Perez with a bullet lodged in his back.
Calling himself “very angry,” Watson said the Austin Police Department should investigate the shooting to “offer clear third-party eyes and expertise, and allow for a level of independence.”
Watson’s quick and assertive response stands in contrast to Houston Mayor John Whitmire, who was put in a similar situation in July after a federal immigration officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a traffic stop.
Whitmire initially questioned whether the city had the authority to conduct its own investigation because the Houston Police Department was not involved in stopping Salgado Araujo’s van. A day after the shooting, Whitmire said “there cannot be two ongoing investigations, certainly when there’s not jurisdiction by one of them.”
After criticism by advocates who said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offered unreliable accounts after previous shootings by its officers, Whitmire three days later said he was committed to supporting an investigation.
“Our hands have been tied, but I’ve instructed the chief [and] city attorney to untie those hands,” Whitmire said in a news conference.
Watson and Whitmire, longtime Democrats who served together in the Texas Senate, took sharply different approaches to similar scenarios.
Mark Jones, a political science fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, said the mayors lead dissimilar cities.
“Austin is arguably the most progressive major city in the state,” he said. “Austin is a dark blue city, whereas Houston is a light blue city.”
In the 2024 presidential election, voters in Austin’s Travis County favored Kamala Harris by 40 percentage points, while voters in Houston’s Harris County backed the Democrat by 6 points.
In Houston, Jones said, “the average voter is a centrist Democrat, whereas the average voter in Austin is a progressive Democrat.”
It would be difficult to design a couple of paragraphs in a story to make me see a brighter shade of red than these did. Austin is 75% of Travis County, while Houston is about 49% of Harris County, and while I don’t have 2024 data for the city of Houston available, in 2020 Joe Biden carried the city by a 30-point margin, while Trump won non-Houston Harris County by four points. Plus-30 in 2020 maybe isn’t “dark blue” – I’ll concede that whatever Houston’s hue is, Austin’s is darker – but get out of here with this “light blue” bullshit. Give me some real goddam numbers before you make a claim like that.
The rest of this I’ve already litigated and I don’t care to do it again. Suffice it to say that Mayor Watson had the right approach, both rhetorically and legally. Mayor Whitmire could learn a thing or two from his former colleague.
But if you really want to get angry, read this.
The most effective escalation of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign happened quietly.
Unlike earlier high-profile raids that drew thousands of protesters into the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, the surge in arrests in June, July and August was captured mostly by grainy security camera footage, through cracked blinds and from behind closed doors.
Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this summer soared to record highs since the start of this Trump administration — with 43,000 in June, more than 49,000 in July and nearly 51,000 in August — as officials cut or narrowed the pathways to legal residency in the United States and expanded the pool of people eligible for deportation.
Federal agents appeared in nearly every corner of daily life, carrying out operations at hospitals and airports, outside suburban schools and along rural construction sites and truck stops. They fanned out from coastal cities in Maine to desert towns in Arizona, across the open plains of Wyoming and down through the southern borderlands.
In Republican-led states like Texas and Florida, where the swell was strongest, they amplified their reach through partnerships with sheriffs and state highway patrol officers. In Democratic strongholds, they intensified their activities despite laws meant to restrict them.
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said the local partnerships, an infusion of federal dollars and new technology had made the dragnet so decentralized that it had attracted less attention.
“This gradual rise everywhere all at once, through a lot of means, is enabling the operation to fly under the radar,” he said.
The spike in arrests, to little public backlash, reflects a turning point in the Trump administration’s efforts to carry out large-scale expulsions of noncitizens. Those arrested were accused of violating civil immigration laws, but most had not been charged with or convicted of a crime. In a statement, ICE defended the expansion of immigration enforcement.
“This is promises made and promises kept in action,” the statement read. “The results speak for themselves.”
We have so much work to do to make America a real country again. I don’t even know where to begin anymore.
No matter what shade of Blue you are (or Red for that matter), if you possess any basic decency, you cannot approve of how ICE is treating people and ignoring due process.